Just middling in America / Ordinary people eroded by their secrets and their unhappiness

Right away it's tempting to yoke the title of Mark Winegardner's new short- story collection to the old myth that Midwesterners have something to teach us about how "real Americans" live, that their stories are in fact "true of everybody." Yet sift through the 13 tales here, and a take-away lesson is precisely what's missing. Winegardner's characters may be pleasant, even occasionally charming, but they illuminate almost nothing beyond their own unhappiness.

The people of "That's True of Everybody" are bowling alley owners and cheating spouses, bored academics and ex-musicians taking a last shot at glory.

Most carry a vague hope that life should be richer than it is but have neither the words to articulate as much nor the energy to change. It's not fear that Winegardner's getting at but apathy born out of either giving up too early or not being satisfied that you did the best you could.

It's a kind of fiction perfected by Raymond Carver and carried on most nobly by Alice Munro. Winegardner has cited them both as inspirations, and his yarns of ordinary people eroded by their secrets bear more than a passing resemblance to theirs. Yet Winegard-

ner's book lacks the final shot of conviction to burn his stories into memory and make them more than just sad people acting sad.

It's not as though Winegardner hasn't tried. The frustrating unevenness here derives not from errors in judgment but from how his gifts seem underused.

Winegardner excels at deftly setting down a story in a clearly defined time and place, as his novel, the sprawling, amiable "Crooked River Burning," demonstrates. There, he gives a routine love story color and dimension by using post-World War II Cleveland as a brilliant backdrop, and earns deserved comparisons to E.L. Doctorow.

However, he offers the same consideration to only a few of the stories here,

which are not surprisingly then the strongest ones. The opener, "Thirty-Year- Old Women Do Not Always Come Home," fills in its ominous title with Harry Kreevich, a near-retirement-age bowling alley owner whose lonely obsession with a missing employee is a mirror of his strained relations with his grown daughters. The collection's apex, "Tales of Academic Lunacy: 1991-2001," is made up of three interlocking stories of three professors who know all too well that campus life can be a sort of stop-time, if you're prepared to accept the consequences to your well-being. In both stories, the setting gives his character's melancholy a reason for being instead of just the accepted state of affairs.

That can't be said for the remainder of the book, which could safely be skipped if our expectations hadn't already been dialed up by what came before. But the last half of "That's True of Everybody" suffers from a glaring lack of follow-through. In one story after another, Winegardner sets up characters and their despairing lives, then walks away. We're left with stories so aimless, so soft in the middle from lack of purpose that one could safely be read in place of all of them, with no losses accrued.

After completing "Crooked River Burning," Winegardner mentioned in interviews that he was "not quite done with Cleveland." Since Cleveland is a shadowy presence at best in "That's True of Everybody," we can only assume that he either lost interest or meant "Cleveland" as an archetype for the Midwest -- the hollowed industrial cities with an aw-shucks charm that the rest of the nation views as a role model or a joke.

Winegard-

ner, a native Ohioan now living in Florida, is a product of this average white guy America, and his previous books, including three on baseball, bear this out. His plainspoken, functional prose has been called, perhaps unfairly, "Midwestern," as if verbal flourish belonged exclusively to writers from the coasts. Yet writers of varying approaches -- from Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" to Evan Connell's "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" -- have been chronicling the quiet malaise of the region for nearly a century. Setting up intriguing scenarios and inhabiting them isn't enough. What is our reason for tuning in other than crude voyeurism? By not pushing his stories into the realm of "everybody," Mark Winegardner has left them sluggish and flat, another sad old myth about the Midwest.